Archbishop Chaput on Alfie Evans

But in the so-called “developed” nations, science and technology have also fostered an approach to life based on utility and efficiency. The calculations of a culture ruled by the computer leave little room for the heart – which is why the philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw technological civilization as dogged by a chronic temptation to totalitarianism. The math of microchips has no tolerance for error or imperfection, and that intolerance can transfer to a culture and spread as easily as a virus.

That’s bad news for human beings, who are too often neither useful nor efficient nor perfect, but rather weak, suffering, flawed and dependent. For Christians, this subtracts nothing from their humanity. Such persons are brothers, not failures, and every needy person is a child of God worthy of love and support. That includes infants struggling to survive a life-threatening illness like Alfie Evans. As we see every day now in the news from Britain about baby Alfie Evans and the efforts by his parents to get him medical help outside the country, “civilized” courts of law can be utterly callous, stubborn, driven by utility, resistant to humanitarian appeals, and brutish in interfering with a child’s right to life and his parents’ right to fight for that life.